Which is an unrelated issue to Polaris.

The 1966 white paper was based on the idea that there was going to be a withdrawal East of Suez and the eventual enactment of that in 1968 was the realisation of that.

Nevertheless this is a pointless argument! We can’t reverse time! Vanguard successor is proceeding and it will carry the already in-service Trident. If you want a minimum second strike capability it is the best choice anything else is a waste of time and money.

I have to disagree about the 1966 White Paper. The Wilson government was determined to keep the East of Suez policy, it was only reversed in 1968 when the devaluation of Sterling made it seem unaffordable. The RAF convinced the government the F111K force could provide air power East of Suez cheaper than carriers.

As to your second point, it is relevant because I fear we are sleep walking into the future. We only got SLBMs in the first place because the US cancelled our preferred weapon, Skybolt, now 50 years on it seems the SLBM force is beyond discussion, even as the coventional Navy is reduced to a small flotilla, and the army, at less than 100,000 men, is more of a gendarmerie than a full army. Even your language betrays Cold War thinking: a “second strike capability” indeed. Against whom, Al Quaeda? We need new thinking, and some flexibility, or we will have a defence force consisting of four SSBNs and convince ourselves that we are therefore well defended.

QUOTE]”

John, the idea that Polaris cost the carrier (s) is far too simplistic, there would be many factors.

1) Yet again, you have not given any evidence that the introduction of Skybolt would be cheaper than switching to Polaris, when the Government itself decided it would be £150m cheaper, you are suggesting that skybolt arrives and forms a viable deterrent into the 1980’s with enough money left to buy a CVA01, you
haven’t provided any reasonable argument for that.

2) Vulcan was not a long range bomber, the idea of it roaming over Russia from far off overseas bases without massive tanker support is farcical. The original requirement was to carry one 10,000lb device 1,500 miles. The Falklands raid and tanker support needed showed that with 21,000 lbs internal the actual legs of a B2 is little over 1,000 miles without a top-up. Factor in carrying 2 x 11,000 lb 40ft missiles on pylons, to reach the optimal launch height for Skybolt of 40,000 feet for a missile range of 950miles. A Vulcan is not a B52, it would be pretty much limited to UK based QRA, ie vulnerable to a first strike and well within range of air launched nuclear armed missiles from Bears or Bagders.

3) You keep mentioning a “plan”, if it was a plan it only lasted 27 months(from cancelling Blue Streak until the realisation that Skybolt wouldn’t be very good), and to try and link that to the adoption of the second part of the plan, the building of CVA01 is wrong and without historical evidence IMO. Kennedy offered the whole programme for $100m, then even offered to pay half the cost, the UK turned it down, why would that be if it was cost effective?

4) The admiralty in a white paper decided to look at new carriers in January 1962, looking at a range of designs form 40,000-68,000 tonnes, from 1963 there was every possibility that the Navy would get at least one up until it’s cancellation in 1966. But yet again IMO, other over ambitious projects, driven by demands to placate industry got in the way. The Carriers grew too big, when cheaper ones may have done the job, and the aircraft to fly from them were the p1154, rather than something more sensible, with complex and expensive radar, “innovation” that added costs (alaskan highways, Sea Dart on stern).
Add that to RAF conniving, the money pit that was TSR2,dabbling with F111, the loss of East of Suez role. They were killed because the RN wanted too much, because UK industry could not deliver a sensible product, because ambitions did not match budgets. I would also add that in real terms, should a shooting war break out in the north Atlantic, CVA01 protected by a T82 would have lasted about 10 minutes, or how relevant it actually was is debatable compared to the 8 SSN’s ordered between 1960 and 1970, the real capital ships of the modern era, so in fact the Navy didn’t do too bad in that period, Resolutions, plus SSN’s etc . I don’t think the adoption of Skybolt would have led to a golden age for the RN and there is ample evidence that other defence projects at the time ate the money.

I am interested in the comment that the British government decided that Polaris was £150 million cheaper than Skybolt. Why would they have gone for Skybolt instead of Polaris if that was the case? I wonder if that figure was some sort of ex post facto justification for a decision we did not take, but which was forced upon us?

Vulcan was indeed a medium range bomber. With 1000 mile range Skybolts, there would have been no for it to fly over Russia at all, that was rather the point of the weapon.

The Skybolt plan was just that, it lasted 27 months until the US cancelled it, which had nothing to do with the views of the British, or Skybolt’s potential. The US just did not need it. If Britain could have afforded to develop Skybolt on its own, or indeed Polaris, we would have. The fact is we could not afford it.

I agree that a lot of money was also wasted over TSR2 and F111K, but point out again that East of Suez was abandoned in 1968, CVA01 was cancelled in 1966. Your comment that CVA01 would have lasted 10 minutes in a war in the North Atlantic is, frankly, silly.

We didn’t need Skybolt to scare Indonesia witless, or to bomb China in the 1960s.

If we’d bought Skybolt, we wouldn’t have had a deterrent into the 1980s. We might have had Skybolt, but it wouldn’t have been a deterrent. That’s why it was cancelled. It was realised that the concept had been rendered obsolete by SLBMs.

Skybolt was cancelled because the Americans decided they did not need it, given the success of Polaris and Minuteman. It wasn’t a British decision, it was a kick in the teeth for Britain.

i would be interested if you could post a source for that please John.

There were newspaper articles a decade or so back that tactical weapons were secretly based in cyprus and Singapore in the early 1960’s as Canberra’s were based there along with Vulcan’s, and vulcan’s in cyprus up until the mid 1970’s

If true, that was a covert basing strategy, not something that would be officially accepted and Skybolt was not a weapon you could hide unlike a small free fall device of NDB.

It would not be a shock if that was the case, as the Vulcan had a tactical nuclear role up until the 1980’s long after the Navy took on the deterrent.

I don’t know if there was ever a plan to base Skybolt bombers in Cyprus or Singapore, though I doubt it would have been hard to do. As far as I know, it was standard gravity bombs which were stored at those bases.

John,

Here is a list of the V Force bases and their dispersal fields.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_V_Bomber_dispersal_bases

Where is the vast expenditure on the V force and airfields across the world? There isn’t. As far as can find in open sources there was never a plan to establish nuclear weapon handling facilities and nuclear weapons transport plans to deploy to bases across the world.

Blue Streak was planned to be the deterrent , requirement issued in 1955, design complete by 1957, total failure and £450m wasted by 1960 (how many CVA1’s does that pay for?).
Skybolt was looked at as the option, as a stop gap that could be bolted onto the last 28 Vulcan B2s, it didn’t start development until May 1959, Blue Streak decision made to cancel in February 1960 and formally binned in the April, after the UK entered into negotiations in March 1960 for Skybolt, before cancelled in December 1962.

During those 29 months, other than a few tests with dummy missiles and five failed electrical tests , and some bolt on pylons added to 28 Vulcan’s. Skybolt was far away from being a viable deterrent on cancellation and had in no way reached the stage where there were detailed plans for its deployment.

Polaris was launched successfully from a submarine in july 1960, and was fully in service by late 1961. With a working Polaris system out there and the offer on the table it would have been madness to turn it down for a system that did not even work.

You can have the biggest warheads imaginable, but if a single warhead can’t penetrate ABM defences it is at a disadvantage to a system that can put 2 or 3 smaller ones on target.
The deployment schedule of the polaris will never be revealed but there is no reason why at times 2 or even 3 boats could not be deployed. The planned fifth hull would have allowed the routine deployment of two.

Bomber Command had dispersal bases in Cyprus and Singapore, each of which stored about 30 nuclear weapons. Dispersal could also have made to RAF bases in the Middle East. Wikipedia isn’t necessarily the font of all wisdom.

Skybolt was not a stop gap, if adopted it would have been a perfectly viable ballistic missile, and was being fast tracked by the USA, I believe about $500 million had been spent on it when it was cancelled. Skybolt’s problem was that Polaris and Minuteman had showed themselves to be excellent systems, and the Kennedy administration had realised that far from there being a “missile gap” in favour of the USSR, the USA far outgunned the Russians. They just didn’t need to spend the money on Skybolt, so cancelled it, thus pulling the rug from under V Force.

The adoption of Polaris meant that only one SSBN could be relied on, hence the Moscow strategy. Five SSBNs would have enabled two SSBNs to be on patrol, but that’s what you get if you vote Labour. V Force at the time was a much bigger force, equipped with megaton yield weapons, and could have devastated the European part of the USSR, not just the capital city.

The point I am making about CVA01 is merely that having spent over £200 million on V Force, within a decade Britain had to spend another £156 million on the four Polaris boats. This had not been expected, and meant the money was not there for CVA01.

You have argued that the V force was a better deterrent than Polaris. You are now pretending that you didn’t. You have also argued that keeping it would have been cheaper than Polaris, & that therefore we should have kept it, & Polaris was a waste of money. The only reason we’ve discussed V bombers in this thread is because of those claims.

You’ve just made the nonsensical claim that a single Vulcan (with two missiles, each with one warhead) would have had greater strike power than a Polaris submarine, which carried 16 missiles with three warheads each. How is this not a (specious) claim of the superiority of the V bomber?

This is the only sensible thing you’ve said, & yet you’ve been arguing that back in the 1960s we should have stuck to the assumptions made in the 1950s, & just drifted along with the same old deterrent as it became ineffective.

But the assumptions made when we got SLBMs have been re-evaluated. There was a review. Just because it came up with an answer you don’t like is not a reason to pretend otherwise.

You seem to have a problem with history. The fact is that Skybolt was going to be the deterrent, and it would have enabled the vast expenditure on the V Force and its airfields across the world not to have been wasted. I haven’t said it was better than Polaris, it had advantages and disadvantages. Polaris provided a secure second strike, but it put all our eggs in one basket, a single SSBN. V Force enabled aircraft to be dispersed across the world, and for British power to be demonstrated in support of Australia and India in the Far East in a way that Polaris couldn’t. And it is simply a fact that V Force could deliver a lot more explosive power than one Polaris boat. Sorry if that is a problem for you, but there you go. Here’s a clue: a megaton is a million tons of TNT equivalent, a kiloton is a thousand tons. There is quite a differnce there.

IIRC that 4 minute warning was, as you say, based on Soviet ICBMs launched from Soviet territory, & didn’t take into account SLBMs launched from different directions & shorter distances (early Soviet SLBMs had to be launched from shorter distances, due to their range). The survivability of a V bomber force sitting on the ground looked increasingly problematical when SLBMs came along.

I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the crew of a Soviet submarine surfacing to launch SSN-4s within 600 km of the V bomber bases, but I doubt there’d have been four minutes warning. Sub-surface launched SSN-5s were in service from 1963, with 1300 km range. Still less than four minutes warning, I reckon. Hence the V bomber force needed to change to continuously airborne to remain survivable, or be replaced by something less vulnerable. It was replaced.

JohnK ignores all this.

I am not ignoring anything, I am making the point that if Skybolt had gone ahead, it WOULD have been the deterrent. That’s just a fact, the agreement had been signed. My point is that UK defence policy had to turn on a sixpence once Skybolt was cancelled, and we got four Polaris boats instead. I fear we are making the same mistake with Trident. Just because something exists now, does not mean it will always be the case. Trident is a huge piece of funding, and the economy might not be able to afford it. Assumptions which made sense in 1980 need to be re-evaluated, otherwise you drift along doing things because that’s the way they have always been done.

No! The opinion you are expressing is Polaris cost the navy CVA01. It did not as you have been repeatedly shown.

How have you shown any such thing. If you think £156 million spent on Polaris boats did not represent an unexpected drain on the defence budget, you are sadly mistaken.